Not surprisingly, ^X, whose name proves to be Justin Smith, didn't agree with
yesterday's article. If I
understand correctly, he had expected me to purchase and read all the books to which he
partially referred yesterday before coming to any conclusion. Callum Gibson suggested that
I at least look at the YouTube
reference, which proved to be a debunking of a specific theory of the origins of
the Indo-Europeans. Just downloading it was difficult enough: it's 700 MB in size, and in
the middle of it my network connection dropped. So I reloaded it on freefall and
then copied the rest with rsync:

16.1 MB/s! That's faster than the NBN, even
faster than my home network.

The lecture is very interesting. It's over an hour in length, and by the time I finally got
it on site, it was too late to watch it all. But in summary it rejects the theory because
it goes only by comparison of vocabulary, not grammar, and doesn't account for borrowings,
thus coming up with demonstrably incorrect relationships between languages. The theory then
uses these relationships to deduce the origins of the Indo-Europeans. The lecture shows
numerous amusingly incorrect claims about the Indo-Europeans; Justin's would fit in well.
And it gives a number of examples of Indo-Aryan languages, which it accepts without comment.

This is my big problem with Justin's arguments: he presents quotations without explaining
how they should support his views. The two I have seen so far have, not surprisingly,
refuted his views, either explicitly or implicitly. I have little doubt that the others
will as well.

He also took me to task for his anti-Muslim views. But there we have logs. From
17 March 2013 it appears that maybe his hatred is directed towards the
Arabs, not the Muslims, though in other places he spoke against Malay Muslims:

^X: Fox news is sponsored/financed by Arab
gr0Ogle: And?
^X: Alwaleed bin Talal financed most american/international news agencies
gr0Ogle: And?
^X: for And? part when there were riots in France and at the time of coverage this arab made them remove Muslims and substitute it with word Youth
^X: leftists are pygmy
Holocaine: Are we doing this again? Yikes.
^X: just stating facts
^X: does that bite
gr0Ogle: I think he's trying to show that anti-semitism doesn't need to be directed at the Jews.
gr0Ogle: "Leftists are pygmy".
Holocaine: I think he's trying to show that, as someone with very firmly held opinions, he also has great stamina.
gr0Ogle: "Rightists are Nazis".
gr0Ogle: Slots are good.
^X: it is not a prejudice
Holocaine: Sloths are good too.
gr0Ogle: Facts are irrelevant.
gr0Ogle: War is Peace.
^X: lol
^X: good good
^X: i am no sloth
gr0Ogle: Doubleplus good.
^X: no this is a good joke
gr0Ogle: ^X: I still don't hears you say anything of substance.
^X: duplicity
Holocaine: gr0Ogle: Are you working at MiniTru? I thought you'd retired?
^X: i can and i will
gr0Ogle: Holocaine: Ssh, don't tell anybody.

I think the end of that discussion was lost on him.

One concrete thing came out of the discussion, though: he may have some extremist views, but
they're not associated with an organized religion. He claims to be an atheist. I still
have no idea what motivates him. By comparison Wendy McClelland is an open book.

It's also clear that, despite his engagement, he either didn't read my article, didn't
understand it, or chose to ignore things. I recall some reprise of his argument on word
order, but I can't find it in the (voluminous) logs. He's also hazy on a number of things
that you'd expect him to know: he
confuses Malay
with Malayalam, and he thinks that the
Himalayas are proof that the Indo-Europeans couldn't have made it from Europe to India. He
drags in the Turks, who have nothing to do with the matter, and also managed to get
South-East Asia involved:

^X: they ignore mountains, himalayas
^X: yes because farmers never crossed himalayas
^X: that is what you miss
^X: in turkey they have ignored northmen lingo
^X: put all this in your diary since you have published it
gr0Ogle: In modern Turkey they speak Turcic.
gr0Ogle: Not related.
^X: well when you generalize indo-european you need to trace it before the discovery of southeast asia
^X: simple logic
^X: that is what germans implied when they coined aryan theory

He asked me to not edit a comment he planned to leave on my blog, until others pointed out that the article
was in my diary, which has, at the bottom:

Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments.
But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details.

But clearly it's unfair not to give him a chance to respond, and so he finally sent in a
mail message written in quoted-printable
with a Microsoft character set. He explicitly requested me to leave it in this form. It
contains more more meandering past things we had already addressed. Interestingly, the time
zone was UTC+5:30, which is India, not Singapore, though in subsequent discussion he claims
to be in an unspecified San Jose, possibly California.

His references to the Qur'an are, like others,
unfathomable. The first (Al-Baqara 65)
reads:

And you had already known about those who transgressed among you concerning the sabbath,
and We said to them, "Be apes, despised."

I wonder what he's trying to say with that. But who cares? My experiment yesterday was to
try to convince him. I failed spectacularly. What I have gained from it is a better
understanding of how somebody can cling to an incorrect belief despite overwhelming evidence
to the contrary, even to the extent of claiming that that evidence supports his views.

I had really expected the discussion about the origins
of Sanskrit to be over yesterday, but no
such luck. Justin disagrees violently but somewhat incoherently with what I wrote, and
wants me to retract it. I've noted that he's an atheist, but I see no reason to change my
opinion.

But there was one thing: he claims that the YouTube lecture supports his claim
that Sanskrit is not an Indo-European language. That's easy enough to verify: I sent a
message to the authors asking, as neutrally as I could, if that were the case, and got a
reply from Asya Pereltsvaig:

Regarding your question about Sanskrit, it's beyond any doubt at this point (and for some
two hundred years) that it is an Indo-European language. Whoever your opponent is, he
(she?) clearly has an axe to grind, maybe more than one. It is also clear that this person
is not interested in reasoned debate or unbiased research. Thus, no matter what you tell
him, it would be the same nonsense he would continue to spout. From my own experience, it
is best not to waste too much of one's time on such people and their crazy ideas. The one
thing I do want to stress from reading your debate is that one has to separate races/genes
from languages. The two do not necessarily coincide, but this point is often missed
completely by the likes of your opponent.

So basically a complete refutation of Justin's claims, going beyond my own question.
Yesterday he had written:

^X: there are many contradictions but when you map things it becomes clear
^X: the youtube lecture proves it
^X: unless you map it you live in make belief world
^X: which is what old indologist did
^X: they found words that made identical noise and put them out of context
* gr0Ogle suspects that the lecture will make sense and have nothing to do with ^X's claims.
callum: I only watched the first 15min or so, but the argument he seems to be making doesnt' seem to be specifically against IE languages in India...
callum: but maybe that's later on.
^X: gr0Ogle: wishful thinking
^X: 35 mins onwards
gr0Ogle: No, just a suspicion.
^X: it proves sanskrit has nothing to do with indo-euro theory
^X: yes i dont dismiss your ignorance though

So I put Asya's reply to Justin and got a somewhat unexpected response:

grO0gle: ^X: That was one of the people on the YouTube that you submitted as evidence for your opinion.
^X: sure it is a point of view and I welcome it
grO0gle: That was *your proof*.
^X: I am saying it is Indo-Iranian language and that person you quote is not a linguist if I understand it
grO0gle: ^X: That person is one of the presenters of the YouTube you submitted as evidence.
^X: yes
^X: that is an opinion and I welcome it
^X: however now since you are quoting logic let me point some more contradictory point of views
^X: read revision of Anatolian hypothesis
^X: read proto-indo-iranian languages
grO0gle: ^X: That's what I'm talking about. This was one of the presenters.
grO0gle: She's completely refuting your claims.
^X: grO0gle: that is fine
^X: it is a point of view
^X: The "original" inhabitants of India were dark-skinned Dravidians. They were invaded by light-skinned Aryans

At this point you might doubt Justin's sanity. It seems more than evident that he either
doesn't understand what's going on, or that he tries to change his tune to fit the current
situation. No wonder he jumps from one topic to another. His presentation is also so vague
that it's not clear what he's trying to say. In that last line he was in fact quoting Peter
Jeremy from a couple of days ago, but he didn't say so, and he didn't give an explanation
for the quote, which, I think, he still doesn't support. But he repeated it later on,
giving the impression that he does now believe it. Who cares?

He spent the afternoon throwing invective such as:

^X: grO0gle: you can draw any conclusion but in my opinion you are a t00l or an useful idiot to say the least
* callum!callum@c122-106-15-156.rivrw1.nsw.optusnet.com.au cue's Mavvie
^X: put that in your diary as it is

Still, after some time he did come up with some references that at first sight appear
support his ideas. This article distances Aryans from
Europeans, which is valid. But the article handles a matter of national identity, a bad
thing to mix with history. India didn't exist 3000 years ago. Neither did Europe, and
certainly not Germany, a country first formed 142 years ago. But the author writes:

Since there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory of an Aryan invasion/migration
into India, and on the contrary, there is compelling evidence to refute it; and since the
theory seriously damages the integrity of the Hindu tradition and its connection to India;
we call for a serious reconsideration of this theory, and a revision of all educational
material on this issue that includes the most recent and reliable scholarship.

He leaves out the compelling evidence. But although the Hindu tradition really goes go back
to the Vedas, suppressing history has never
worked well. Advocating its suppression based on potential damage to modern Hinduism is
stupid. More to the point, though, the article doesn't mention the term “Indo-European” at
all. But it's easy to see how this kind of article could have confused Justin.

On a purely linguistic level, the article is also flawed. It claims that the
term arya was never used to identify people. The people of Iran would be horrified. I pointed
Justin at it, who typically ignored the reference to the name Aryan and picked on the
name Persia. On the other hand, he then came up with this link which,
once again, seems to refute all his claims.

He gave me a number of other links, such as this one, none of which make any claims that Sanskrit is not an Indo-European language. This
particular article considers the possibility that the original Indo-Europeans all came from
India. While that seems unlikely, it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility. But
like just about all these links, the emphasis is on national identity, seen from a modern
perspective. That's the same kind of attitude that in more extreme form gave rise to the
Nazi concept of blond-haired, blue-eyed “Aryans”.

To support his assertions, Elst claims that the Vedas were written about 3000 BC, before the
first known horse-drawn chariots, dating to about 2000 BC, were found in
the Ural mountains. This appears
necessary to explain the arguments: consensus is that the Vedas were written somewhere in
the time frame 1500 BC to 500 BC. But all of this is tangential to the central theme that
Sanskrit is undoubtedly an Indo-European language.

People like Koenraad Elst are not
without their critics, but then there are reputable news service, like
the
BBC, who published an article about the
Mapping the origin of Indo-European article that Lewis and Pereltsvaig debunked in their YouTube lecture. The title “English
language 'originated in Turkey'” sets the tone. It goes into more detail
of Phylogenetics than language. To
be fair to the BBC, they apparently had the agreement of Professor Mark
Pagel, who sees the study as being conclusive. It's not clear to what extent he was
involved in the study—he has co-authored another study with the main author of the Anatolian paper—but if such people are so
easily satisfied, it's understandable that people like Justin Smith can be misled.

I don't know why people do this. It's almost impossible to find things in a fridge like
that, and it almost invariably requires removing everything on a shelf. But none of the
upright freezers we saw have more than one or two baskets. We accepted the inevitable and
decided to buy baskets separately.

Not easy, of course. It would be nice to find wire mesh baskets with adjustable size, but
all Yvonne could find were standard polypropylene boxes,
which are designed to be stacked and covered and thus have slanting walls and a ridge at the
top, which greatly reduces the space available:

So she called up the manufacturer's representative. Yes, we can buy more of either of the
two baskets supplied with the fridge (they're of different size). The bigger one, about 10
cm too shallow for the top shelves, would cost $193 each, and we'd need 4 of them—$772 in
total, and that for a fridge that cost $1169! Somehow we'll find a better solution.

First issue: it requires python 3.3.2, but the version installed on my machine is 2.7.2.
They're not compatible (bad python!), so rather than remove the installed version
from eureka, my main machine, I did it on teevee, the TV machine. And to my
astonishment there were several hundred dependencies—but make deinstall removed it
anyway. Fortunately I was able to reinstall version 2.7.5, which doesn't seem to have any
compatibility issues—and then I discovered that the two versions can co-exist.

Spent the afternoon going through the introduction to python, which took me a lot further
than the python course had done in two weeks. Once again I'm Just Plain Puzzled by
python—it seems so different from other languages. The conditional expressions seem just
plain bizarre, but it's easier to look at some of the constructs from
a LISP
perspective. Comprehensions
remind me of
re-ordered lambda
expressions. And then there are things that don't get explained enough, at least here:
which objects are passed by value, which by reference? Numbers belong to the former, sets
to the latter. But strings? I haven't got that far, but this look-ahead makes it almost
more difficult for me than for a beginner.

I've been investigating Justin Smith's opinions
on Sanskrit for some days now, and
really it's over and done with. But I'm interested in the topic, and it has opened a lot of
new avenues of investigation. One rather surprising one was that Justin
today finally gave me an indirect
pointer via a
review of an article which has since been removed. The second link provides excerpts
that not only support his views, but probably formed them. It's not clear why he didn't
come up with this earlier. Justin seems to think that the first article agrees, though it's
clear that it does not.

The review page is sheer unmitigated nonsense. It starts off by discussing the pain that
Hungarians feel because Magyar
has not gained entry to
the Indo-European language
club. It goes on (all original spelling):

Building primitive lexicons that show similar roots for certain common words can hardly be
an adequate basis of linguistic classification. Especially if that classification is going
to be further used to generate implications about sociological and cultural
development. If the commonality between Indian and European langauages extends only to a
small pastoral-era oral lexicon, the Indo-European theory of langauges could hardly be
called in to justify the “Aryan Invasion” theory let alone infer that the Vedas were
written by “Indo-European Aryan” migrants

He has carefully omitted grammar, in particular inflection, here. His real point seems to
be:

In fact, one of the unintended (or even intended) consequences of such linguistic
speculation is that there has been a needless intellectual division between North Indians
and South Indians,

Why should that be? And what relevance does that have? To Shishir Thadani, it seems to be
the central matter. He goes on to analyse languages based on writing systems that were
imposed later, such as Devanagari
and Tamil script:

And although linguists are divided as to which came first, both Sanskrit and Tamil are
written in very similar ways. Unlike the European langauges that are written using
alphabets (derived from Greek, and branching off from Latin or Cyrillic), all Indian
languages are written using syllables made up of (simple or compound) consonant shapes
that are modified by the symbols for vowels that connect the consonants.

That's completely irrelevant to the language itself. How can anybody take it seriously? It
would imply that nobody could speak if he couldn't first write.

He then goes on to say:

It may also be noted that across India, both Sanskrit and Tamil derived languages use SOV
(subject Object Verb) word order as a default. But several Indo-European langauges such as
English, French, Portugese and Bulgarian use SVO word order.

At the end the reviewer states that Sh Thadani was ”assisted in his reasearch[sic] by
Giti Thadani, who is intimately familiar with several European langauges including German,
French and Hungarian (as well as Sanskrit)”. If that's the case, then the statements are
deliberately misleading. Even modern Hindi
is closer to, say, German than Magyar (“Hungarian”) is, and as I've already mentioned,
German frequently mandates verbs at the end of the sentence. Once again I'm left with the
impression that this kind of article is deliberately misleading.

Elst's Out of India theory

Reading about the Out of India
theory confirms what I've been thinking all along. The whole business is primarily a
misguided attempt to promote Hindu nationalism. I have no objection to the Hindu faith, but
I object to extremists wherever they occur.

Most language courses are boringly simplistic. The one I'm going through
for Python is not.
One of the issues, of course, is the lack of description of the syntax, particularly since
it's so baroque. But mainly the issue is that it requires a completely different approach
to programming from what I've seen before. I hope it gets easier once I have accepted the
basics.

Doubtless the recent revelations
of Edward Snowden have shocked the
world, including most US citizens. But somehow it seems to be only the tip of the iceberg.
Where is Snowden? Still in Moscow airport? It seems that yesterday a number of people
believed him to be in the private jet
of Evo Morales, the President
of Bolivia. And a number of European
countries refused him passage through their air space.

The reports are varied and garbled. A number of sources report (here from the Washington Post):

Choquehuanca said in a statement that after France and Portugal canceled authorization for
the flight, Spain’s government allowed the plane to be refueled in its territory. From
there the Falcon plane flew on to Vienna.

But why return from Spain to Vienna? Have people looked at a map? As this map shows, to get from Spain (in fact,
as reported elsewhere, the Canary
Islands) to Bolivia you don't need to go through Portuguese or French airspace:

It makes sense for them to have planned to refuel
in Lisbon,
but Fuertaventura would in fact be
a better choice. But if they're there, why on earth return to Vienna, especially as
other reports claim that Italy also cancelled authorization to fly through their air space. That route is in exactly the wrong
direction, and it crosses both French and Italian air space:

Why go there, especially since getting there without crossing Italian or French air space
would involve flying south past all of Italy, a significant detour?

My best guess is that the reporters got it all wrong and didn't have enough insight to
notice that it couldn't be correct. In all likelihood, the plane never got further from
Moscow than Vienna. Spain would have allowed refuelling where Portugal didn't, but the
problem was getting there in the first place—the issue with French and Italian air
space in the opposite direction. That's confirmed by this report. François
Hollande apologized with the explanation that they were unaware that Morales was on
board. Believe that if you will, and then ask why it should make any difference.

But how plausible is the story in the first place? It's clear that the reports contradict
each other, and France, of all places, is not known for bowing to US pressure. Indeed the
second article above mentions that France wants to postpone talks with the US until they
explain allegations of US espionage in European diplomatic missions. And even Russia was
not prepared to grant asylum to Snowden unless he promised to stop revealing state secrets.
It's difficult to believe that such countries would take such an extraordinary step without
extreme influence of the USA.

So, back to the USA, that bastion of freedom and law. What has their government done to
maintain this status?

They have violated their own laws by spying on their citizens, in violation of their own
constitution.

They have apparently spied on allied countries, in violation of international law. This
report comes from the Spiegel, in my mind
hardly the most trustworthy magazine, but clearly the European heads of state are taking
the allegations seriously enough.

They persecute people who bring this sorry state of affairs to light. Yes, I think that
Snowden could have done things differently, but the reaction is out of all proportion.

It seems clear to me that the US government must have applied unimaginable force behind
the scenes if both Russia and France bowed to it.

On a completely unrelated note, but equally concerning, they continue to violate the
territorial integrity of Pakistan
with drones. In
the news today more civilians were killed in a US attack targeting
the Taliban. While I agree that the
Taliban are a worthy target, it doesn't justify breaking international law to do so.

What does that have to do with the USA? Well, the people of the US are some of the victims.
But clearly the government is not sticking to its principles. It's turning a bastion of
truth, honesty and freedom into a global bully. Shame on them.

Why do the Swedes like meat balls so
much? They're so popular that
the Wikipedia page on Swedish
cuisine shows them as the main representative. Went looking for a recipe today and discovered there's really nothing very
special about them. But I did find a modified version, biff à la Lindström, which is certainly different
enough to be interesting. I'll probably need a second pass to get it right.

Spent some time today investigating the contradictions in the story
of Evo Morales' forced stopover in
Vienna. The results are interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, as I suspected, the
plane didn't leave Austrian air space, as this image shows:

But why did they turn back? Yes, they were approaching Italian air space. But according to
this report the plane didn't have enough fuel to get to
the Canary Islands, some distance
further than Lisbon. The plane is
a Dassault Falcon 900EX,
which has a range of 4,500 nautical miles. From Moscow to Fuerteventura is 2,730 nautical
miles, well within the range of the plane. But it seems that over Austria they developed
problems with the fuel indicator, as this transcript of the exchange
with Schwechat air
traffic control shows. Under those circumstances, it's perfectly normal to land at the
nearest airport.

And the Austrians (obviously) didn't refuse entry to their air space. So why should they
search the plane
for Snowden? Did they
search the plane for Snowden? Reports there are very vague as well.

All in all, the more I look at this matter, the less plausible it seems. Yes, no question,
Morales made an unscheduled landing at Schwechat. And there were some issues with
authorization to enter French air space, something that he hardly needed anyway. The Great
Circle barely cuts through the south of France:

But it also goes north of Austria, while the real flight path went over Austria. Possibly
this path already indicated corrections made because of France's refusal. Portugal, it
seems, had refused entry some days earlier for “technical reasons” that could hardly have
had anything to do with Snowden, which is why Morales' team had planned to refuel on the
Canary Islands.

On the other hand, it's clear that France did initially refuse entry. Why? They
don't say. But that doesn't seem to have been the reason for the landing in Schwechat. And
Italy? There's no confirmation that they did refuse entry, and the facts suggest that they
didn't. The truth may come out, but I'm no longer as convinced of US involvement as I was
yesterday. There are silly reports like “trying to kidnap“ Morales, which, it seems, he
started. And so far I haven't seen any report linking the affair to Edward Snowden.

On the other hand, the research has brought out some interesting web sites. This report includes a link to a map which, at some
point, shows the path of the flight, though I haven't worked out how to control it yet. And
this page discusses some of the points I raised yesterday, though better.

And if that isn't enough, this
report claims that the Embassy
of Ecuador in London—current home
of Julian Assange—has been bugged,
and that they had discovered it a couple of weeks ago and not reported it. Somehow, though
the whole matter horrified me, I'm gradually left wondering how much truth there is in the
allegations.

This matter with Evo Morales'
unplanned stopover
in Wien gets
stranger and stranger. Gradually the news media are beginning to ask obvious questions.
Strangely, the UK Daily Mail—not a
newspaper I would turn to for in-depth coverage—has asked a surprisingly detailed report with a number of pertinent questions. But there are
many more. Here's what I have so far:

It seems certain that France initially denied passage over its airspace, but why? And
for how long?

Did Morales' flight take off before it had clearance to cross all necessary air space
before landing? That's an absolute requirement, so it seems difficult to believe that
it didn't. And in particular the flight path suggests that it was avoiding France.

Did Portugal deny access to their air space? The only statements with any backing are
that they were unable to refuel the flight due to unknown technical reasons, and that
Morales' flight crew had been informed days in advance.

Did Spain refuse access to its air space? Some maintain this, but it does not seem to
make sense.

Did Italy refuse passage? Again, there are claims, but no official statement. It's
interesting that both Spain and Italy were not mentioned until long after the initial
reports.

What role did Austria play? If anybody diverted the plane, it would be the Austrians,
and they're the only people who—maybe—searched the plane. But nobody's blaming them for
anything.

What role did Snowden play? The connections with him are remarkably vague.

What role did mechanical problems play? In the transcript of the exchange
with Schwechat
air traffic control there's talk of problems with the fuel gauge. Is the transcript
genuine? So far nobody has claimed it's not.

This report suggests that Bolivia claimed that all four countries had refused access.
Presumably this will all come to light when the UN handles the complaint. But it's becoming
increasingly clear that the reporting of this incident leaves much to be desired.

How about this non-conspiracy-theory version: Edo Morales sets off home from Moscow. Back
in Bolivia, people discover that he has been refused access to French air space, and that
his planned refuelling in Lisbon had been changed to Fuerteventura due to unspecified
“technical reasons”. They and start to wonder why, and note that Morales had been
criticized for showing a preparedness to grant asylum to Snowden, and jump to conclusions.
Then the plane runs into (minor) technical problems and chooses to land in Vienna to have
the matter seen to, something that can only be done the following day. On landing at
Vienna, the authorities visit the plane and check the identity of the passengers. Austrian
media are quick on the scene and put their own spin on the story. The plane is repaired and
continues to Bolivia via Fuerteventura and somewhere in Brazil. The whole time Morales is
informed only by his staff, so he doesn't know of the incorrect assumptions.

Zali from Enfield is
spending the night in Melbourne and was
looking for somebody to look after
her Borzoi bitch Bindy, who happens to be
Zhivago's daughter, so she asked Yvonne to look after her for the night. That's quite convenient for us
for a couple of reasons: firstly, we were about to ask Zali to look after Zhivago
while we went to Melbourne (though only for the day), and secondly we were interested
to see how we would get on with a younger, more lively dog: Zhivago is over 7, and Bindy is
only 20 months old.

She arrived, a little nervous, and then she saw Piccola. After her in a flash. After I caught Bindy and told her off, we found
Piccola on a filing cabinet in Yvonne's office, tail three times the normal thickness. But
later I showed Lilac to Bindy, and Bindy
behaved herself. By the evening things were looking much better:

I've been looking more at http://www.flightradar24.com/, which is a
surprising mixture of very useful information and frustrating user interface. Looking at
flight traffic in the Near East shows some remarkable patterns:

Apart from that, it seems to be possible to track specific flights, but not to get a
historical view of traffic at a particular time: there's no way to enter date or time, and
even when it shows traffic from older flights, it doesn't display the date. And I haven't
found any real instructions. Maybe things will improve.

There was a TV programme on SC10 TV this afternoon:
“Your very first puppy”. We're not exactly the target audience, but we thought it would be
interesting to watch. It was, but not for the reasons I had expected. It went through the
examples of three different puppies and the people who bought them. In every case the dogs
misbehaved badly.

What do you do about misbehaving dogs? If your German Shepherd Dog jumps onto the table
while you're eating, it seems that you buy a compressed air horn and blow it at him. If
your puppy chews things, you don't remove then: you put up with it. Nowhere in the 1 hour
programme did I hear the advice to say “no”.

And feeding? Dry food is good enough. Never mind that it causes the teeth to rot and the
resultant stools to stink, nor that it's more expensive than healthy food: they didn't even
mention that alternative.

No harm in overestimating a little, I suppose: far too many people get animals and then dump
them because of the unexpected costs. But $1200 for food seemed far too high. And our vet
costs are worm tablets and vaccinations, about $100 a year. And what are “Extras”, and why
is the number so precise? OK, they recommend dry dog food, presumably because the
manufacturers want them to, whereas we feed cheaper natural fresh food, but that wouldn't
explain the difference. Afterwards I checked what we spent last year for Lilac, Piccola, Nemo and Zhivago: $1,779.76, almost exactly two thirds of that
sum. That's only one dog (Zhivago replaced Nemo on the same day), but there are still 3
sets of vet fees, and both Zhivago and Nemo are big, hungry dogs. Where do they get their
numbers from?

My weather station has never been very reliable,
and over the course of time I've been putting more and more heuristics into my software to
catch the more obvious errors, most recently three months ago. But once again it seems to
be getting cleverer: it's generating less obvious errors, and I can't catch them. Do I
care? Yes, but not enough to drop everything and think out Yet Another Way of catching
errors. Why didn't they just put a checksum in the transmitted data?

One of the things that came to light while rearranging the fridge was a number of bottles of
commercial beer, all old. Throw them away? It makes sense to try them first.

The first was a bottle of Pilsner Urquell,
which I bought in Canberra round
20 April 2005, and which I recall not having tasted any good at the
time. It didn't taste good now either, and it was far too dark. But maybe that was the way
it was at the time.

The other was a Trumer
Pilsener with a best-by date of 5 May 2005. Trumer is
in Salzburg, and I visited a couple of
breweries there with Hubert Hanghofer on 26 October 2004, so it seemed
reasonable that I bought the beer at the time. But no, the label was Australian. In any
case, this beer tasted good, nice and malty, just nothing like a Pilsener. But maybe that's
the way it's supposed to be. In any case, it shows that, at least with cooling, a good beer
can keep for a very long time.

Chris Bahlo along for dinner tonight, as usual on Saturdays. After dinner, while Yvonne went to sleep with boredom, we talked about her new job at a
local web design company whose name I forgot to ask. We discussed again my incomprehension
that Wordsworth had taken four
days to move the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical
Gardens web site from the existing, functional site to the new site—why couldn't they
just have cut over the DNS when it was up and running? Chris said “updating a page on our
sites normally doesn't cause more than two minutes lack of access”.

WHAT? Why that? Chris said that it was acceptable. I said that there's no
reason for any inaccessibility (well, not more than the time it takes to rename two files).
With rsync you can not only cut over
seamlessly, but also ensure that you don't forget any files (though more than one could
introduce a seam). But they copy files manually.

After I calmed down, I discovered that wasn't the only issue. They do their web design by
maintaining a local copy of the site—nothing wrong with that—but it seems that
their Content Management
System (Joomla) doesn't do what I
expected. In particular, there's no form
of revision control. The only
way to avoid data loss is to physically ensure that no two people work in the same area at
the same time. This, too, they consider acceptable. If they need to roll back a change,
they take the manual backup that they had made.

This is a problem that was solved decades
ago! SCCS is over 40
years old. When I started working at my first real job, on 2 May 1973, the UNIVAC 1108 system had a file
format, ELT, which incorporated up to 63 versions of a file. It must have been
introduced some time round 1968. And now people are still doing this by hand?

I wonder if this is an issue specific to Chris' employer, or whether most web design
companies work like this. Clearly I need to understand what CMS systems do. I had assumed
that they would at the very least take care of revision control. But probably there's no
reason not to use revision control in addition to content management.

I'm continuing with this supposed linear algebra course, though so far I've only been learning python, and even the exercises aren't obviously related to
linear algebra. I've signed a declaration of honour that I won't tell people about
it—designed to ensure that people don't copy other people's results. So I can't give too
much detail, but the current exercise is to build a reverse index for a text search engine.

How do you do that? The assignment documentation gives just enough information for you to
be able to infer what they mean. And finally they've admitted that python has normal
iteration constructs, and not
just comprehensions. Spent
some time doing the main exercise, building the index itself. In the process discovered a
number of non-obvious things:

{1, 2} is a set. {1} is a set. {} is a dictionary. To
create an empty set, you need to use the constructor (if that's what they call
it) set().

Indentation determines block structure. That's a thing I have known for a long time,
and one of the main reasons I have held off looking at it more closely. But how do you
end a block? Outdent, of course—most of the time. But it seems that in some cases
that's not enough, and you need an empty line as well. Doubtless that's in the
documentation somewhere, and maybe my interpretation is inaccurate. But it confirms my
prejudice that relying on indentation is bad.

My index implementation worked. But what about performance? Running it against the large
collection of data supplied with the assignment used up 140 minutes of CPU time. Is that
acceptable as a solution for the task? I don't know, but it's not acceptable to me. Once
again I'm looking not at the algorithm, but at the constraints of the programming language.

Decades ago, round mid-1975, one of my colleagues at IBAT
in Essen told us about
the eight queens puzzle:
Place 8 queens on a chess board so that they can't attack each other. He promptly set to
and wrote a program in BASIC, which he ran
on our Dietz 621 computer, not the world's fastest. After about 3 hours he had the first result, and it
looked as if the whole thing would take weeks.

But Real Programmers use assembler, so I implemented the same algorithm in assembler.
Faster. It only took (many) minutes for the first result. Still not good enough.

The problem was that the algorithm was iterative, and it really would have gone through 2⁶⁴
iterations. What we needed was recursion. But what machines had stacks? The
legendary PDP-11, of course, but where
could we get one of those? So I simulated a stack in assembler, ran the program, and it
output the results as fast as the (2400 bps) terminal could display them. Clearly I had
made a mistake.

Of course, I hadn't. That was the difference in speed of the algorithms. For some time to
come I wrote the same algorithm in different languages to compare speeds. I last ran the
latest version in early 1996,
under BSD/OS, and to get any useful timing
I had to run it 100 times. Bringing it up to date today gave me a run time of 0.035909 s,
including outputting all the results. How times change!

Getting back to the reverse index problem: somehow I have the same feeling, that there's
some elegant python solution that's not obvious to mere C programmers. It's interesting to
notice that there's a solution to the queens problem written in python on the Wikipedia
page. It also seems to be typical of languages that keep changing their syntax that the
solution didn't work on python 3. I first had to fix it:

Today Asiana airlines flight
OZ214 crash landed
at San Francisco
International Airport. Fortunately most of the passengers survived. Apart from the
news coverage, it was a good test of flightradar24. It didn't do well. It did come up with a plausible time—16:43—and on
at least one occasion it came up with information on the flight, but I never got to see the
flight path. My guess is that it's a timing-sensitive Java application, and it doesn't
handle my network connection well. If they ever build the radiation tower (should have started a couple of
weeks ago, but they haven't yet), things should improve. About the only information was the
URL of the playback: http://www.flightradar24.com/2013-07-07/10:05/AAR2144#!/2013-07-06/16:43/AAR214.
It seems that AAR2144 and AAR214 are alternative flight numbers, and the date and time are
clear. So maybe I can get more information from that.

And the news coverage was correspondingly flaky. No mention of possible causes. The only
coverage I saw with any insight at all was Al
Jazeera, where the newsreader asked the ex-chief of
the NTSB if the issue was similar to the
crash of British Airways
Flight 38. And indeed it was: this plane was also
a Boeing 777, and it crashed after a
long, uneventful international flight by coming down too short before the runway. That
incident was traced to the engines (Rolls-Royce Trent 895), but so far there has been no
information either way about the engines of OZ214.

It's cold at this time of year, of course, and we're trying to save energy, so we're keeping
the room temperature (measured on the wall 1.5 m above the ground) below 23°. But it feels
really cold! This evening I checked: at 1.5 m, 23.4°. At head height in the armchair,
about 20°. At foot height, 17°. What a pain these badly insulated houses are!

One of the consequences of the water bed leak is that the carpet in the room is both sodden and exposed. It's also
old and dirty—perfect time to replace it. We've done some pricing at Bunnings, who charge a flat fee for installing any
amount of carpet. But this is only about 12 m², hardly worth the cost.

It's not as if the carpets in the rest of the house are in the best of shape. So we
considered replacing more. The biggest issue is that there are things on the carpets that
would have to be moved, so we decided against the offices (in mine there's enough junk on
the carpet that you can hardly see it anyway) and the master bedroom. But the two lounge
rooms in the north of the house could be changed pretty quickly.

Off into Ballarat to check a few carpet
shops. First was the Carpet & Tile Gallery in Armstrong Street South, where we were
shocked by the prices—$200 for an average carpet. But they do themselves an injustice. The
prices quoted are for a linear metre, laid. And the linear metre is 3.65 m (presumably 12
feet) wide, so that's really $55 per m². And what's that in terms of base price? $45/m²?

Spent some time looking and came up with a quite reasonable looking carpet for what promises
to be “$120”, probably better than what we could get at Bunnings. And after the effort that
the salesperson (who proved to be the managing directory, Chris Cartledge) had gone to, we
decided to accept that. He'll be along tomorrow to measure things—all part of the service,
it seems.

While in town, went looking for water bed stuff. Nothing. Looks like we'll have to buy the
parts on eBay after all.

Revisited my inefficient python program today,
and as expected got it much more efficient—0.9 seconds instead of 140 minutes, just shy of a
1000-fold improvement in performance. It still wasn't easy, not because of program logic,
but because of python strangenesses. The more I learn of python, the more I
like LISP. How do you select from a
composite object? It depends. Maybe there's a function to do it for you, maybe you can
subscript them. Most of my modifications were related to finding the correct syntax for
selecting what I wanted. Doubtless there are good reasons, but it seems so much easier just
to keep everything as a list.

While writing yesterday's diary, checked the Pilsner Urquell web site. What a catastrophe! You're not even allowed
to read it if you're not of drinking age. And how do they check that? You have to
enter your date of birth! And even that is difficult. Three drop-down choice menus:

So if you're born in October to December, or after the 9th of any month, or before 2001
(i.e. if you are of drinking age almost anywhere in the world) you have to scroll down for
every single selection. And for what? They can't check.

Maybe there are legal requirements for this sort of thing, which in themselves are silly:
don't authenticate by anything you can't check. That's nonsense. You'd think they didn't
want anybody to access their site.

One of the most frustrating things about my wireless Internet connection is its variability.
When it works well, it's better than a standard ADSL connection—I've had real-world transfer
rates of up to 300 kB/s in both directions. But you can't rely on it, and since the
beginning of the year even VoIP has become
unreliable. And they still haven't started building the radiation tower.

Today, after nearly 5 days of connection and acceptable signal quality, things went to hell
again. It's not just slowness, it's the timeouts that irritate me. For some reason DNS is
a particular problem. Spent some time playing with my named configuration, in
particular increasing the query timeout to 30 seconds:

That's only of limited use, though, as Edwin Groothuis pointed out: many programs have their
own timeouts, normally 10 seconds. And I frequently reached the 30 second timeout.

The other issue was downloading the videos for my linear algebra course. They're generally
in the order of 20 MB in size, so at 200 kB/s they should take about 100 s. When the
radiation tower is operative, that should drop to 8 seconds. But my speeds today were more
like 2.5 kB/s, which takes about 2¼ hours. It's enough to make you scream, especially since
web downloads aren't really set up to restart a transfer. Ended up loading them to my
external server (in a couple of seconds) and then rsyncing them here.

So I've finished my first two assignments for the linear algebra course, and finally
we're getting to the subject of the course. Spent some time watching the video lectures,
which are much easier than the assignments, probably because (so far) there's not much to
learn. Still, it has taken a lot of time to get this far. Hopefully the assignments will
become more understandable too.

We've been watching the SBS Television series
Food Safari. It's a strange
mixture of excellence and sloppy research: they claimed
that Rollmops are British, and that the
French word for pork belly is Speck (which
they pronounce “spake”), another German word. The real French word is “lard”. But some of
the recipes they bring out are not bad, and Yvonne was
particularly taken by the agurk salat (“cucumber salad”) in the Danish Food
Safari a while back, so much that we're working out our own version. It's interesting in that it seems to fit
just about any meal.

On with the linear algebra course today, and finally it's getting towards what I was expecting. Why am I having
difficulty? The thing that got me was the terminology (“onto” is an adjective in maths, it
seems, though the OED doesn't seem to think so),
but finally they've handled that, and I've at least got round to understanding my problem:
they're talking about formal set theory, something that I have never done before. Not that
that makes a difference: I have
done complex numbers, but in a
previous lecture they
presented Euler's identity
(which they call Euler's formula):

Without explanation, that's so mind-blowing that it's difficult to comprehend, as xkcd puts it:

I was sure I hadn't seen that before. But when I checked my school maths notes I discovered
it on the first page of my 1964 notes, written presumably at the end of September, without
name but with derivation. At least I correctly guessed that it could be proved in terms
of infinite series, and when you
look at it like that it no longer looks as surprising.

On with my linear algebra course, which is getting easier. But it seems to come from a parallel universe. No wonder I
was confused. I've known about vectors for over 50 years, and it's clear what they are: a
magnitude and a direction. Just to be sure I dragged out my old university maths book,
which showed exactly what I remember. But that's not what vectors are today, at least
according to this course: they're a special kind of discrete function.

That's part of the reason why this is taking me so long: a new student would just learn and
accept, but I'm stopping on every corner looking for
reasoning. Wikipedia doesn't help: it
comes up with dozens of different partial definitions, some self-referential, but it took me
quite a while to find that it refers to my kind of vector as
a Euclidean vector. I'm left
wondering whether the way the course presents it is typical or not.

Message in the mail today pointing at
this page (“7 Facts You Never Knew About Our Aussie Dollar”, which says more about
the author than the reader). One of the points interested me

Sir Robert Menzies suggested the
new currency be called ‘royals’ – further showing his loyalty to the monarch. Eventually
the dollar was agreed upon, though not after some other hysterical suggestions including:
The Roo, The Digger, The Boomer, The Kanga, The Kwid, The Dinkum and more.

We're planning to eat bulgogi tomorrow, and spent
much of the day preparing for it. I wonder if it's worth the trouble; somehow all the
accompaniments seem the same, and they certainly take longer than necessary.

One common ingredient is toasted sesame seed, which works relatively well in our toaster
oven. Empirically 3 minutes on “LO” grill seem about right.

I've been using Emacs for
ever, to the point where the key bindings come so naturally that I couldn't describe them
without looking at what I do on the keyboard. So every small change made in subsequent
versions of Emacs is particularly irritating.

I'm not the only one. Peter Jeremy was complaining about it on IRC recently, but unlike me,
he did something about it. Here's his initialization code:

I've been tracking what appears to
be Radio Frequency
Interference for some time, mainly in regard to TV reception. But the little Sony mini
Hi-Fi system that I bought four years ago has been emitting random hissing noises, each a few seconds long, for some time, and I've
been wondering whether that's related.

Today things got a lot worse, to the point where the reception was no longer acceptable.
The problem was, it was only the Sony receiver. The (26 year) old tuner in my bed works as
well as it ever has. So I went looking for an alternative and found an
old Marantz tuner (probably of the same
vintage) which I connected up to the audio input. It works.

While investigating, discovered another thing with the Hi-Fi system: the main knob runs some
digital converter that normally controls the volume. Now it seems to be getting confused
about the direction: if I move it slowly in the “up” direction, it counts down. How can
that happen?

One thing's clear, though: I used to think of Sony as a company that produced superior
products. I've long taken a disliking to them for their business practices—abusing
the GNU Public License, for
example—but I was expecting a good product. This one has had three separate and unrelated
failures (the other one was a failed CD drive, after less
than 5 months), and the recent ones are not typical of modern electronics. For me, at any
rate, it's clear that Sony no longer have any technical advantage.

And the extended warranty? When I bought it, they offered me an extended warranty for 4
years—for 35% more than the purchase price! Even if I had taken it, though, it would have
expired 2 months ago.

My network connection has gone to hell again. After 5 days of relative peace (though not
good throughput) it started again a couple of days ago: 3 disconnects on the 9th, 7 on the
10th, 3 on the 11th, 6 on the 12th, and 8 today. And in each case reconnecting my myriad
TCP connections can take up to 5 minutes. I can no longer keep my MythTV programme information up to date, because
the network link won't stay up long enough.

What should I do? Report it to Internode Support? That way madness lies. Once they were good. Now they don't even bother to escalate
things. Is that because of the takeover by iiNet? I don't know, but when the radiation tower finally gets built, it's by no means a foregone conclusion that I'll
stay with Internode.

As planned, ate bulgogi for dinner this evening,
on the gas grill that I bought 5 years ago. I
subsequently found the top part for it, but we never seem to have used it much. It worked
relatively well, and it tasted good, but there was a problem: smoke. Within a few minutes
of starting, the smoke alarm went off. We turned on the ceiling fan, which gave us another
few minutes, but in the end we had to continue with the raclette grill, which really doesn't
get hot enough. Clearly a dish for outdoors.

So we said yes, and an hour later a nameless installer showed up and knocked on the door
instead of pressing the doorbell. We had been told that he would need all day, but in fact
he had a dentist's appointment at 15:30, so he had to leave round 14:40. He optimistically
thought he'd get it all done by then, but of course he was only half finished. He came back
afterwards, though, and finally round 18:30 he was done.

That is looking down, of course, but the perspective is so extreme that it doesn't seem to
be worth the trouble. I can't think of a good way to represent it. I took (almost) a full
360° × 180° view of the bedroom, so I was able to make an animated panorama of it, and that certainly looks better.
But I didn't bother to do the ceiling of the lounge room, and without that I couldn't
process the images at all. At the very least I need to find out how to make a full
equirectangular projection of a panorama with less than 180° vertical field of view.

Out to the post office in Napoleons to
pick up the water bed accessories, and then attended to the bedroom.
Yvonne has decided to rearrange the furniture in the room,
which makes sense, but it means that I had to reattach the bookshelves to the wall, and of
course I didn't have the right kind of plugs for this horrible plasterboard. After some
cursing and swearing, gave up the attempt. Yvonne will have to buy some plugs tomorrow when
she goes shopping.

The start of construction for the radiation
tower is long past the estimate of four to five weeks that I got two months ago, and
yesterday I asked my sources again. No, no problems, and construction should start within
days. But when I went past today, I still didn't see anything.

Well, not much. In the paddock next door there have been a number of old bales of hay. Now
they're being removed and burnt (the smoke on the left):

Still working on this linear algebra
course. It's difficult enough that I'm left wondering about my capabilities, but
gradually I'm coming to terms with it. Today was something more akin to traditional
programming: implementing a class for manipulating the strange vector representation used in
the class. That's a sparse vector consisting of two components: a list of possible values
and those values that are non-0. So assigning a couple of typical vectors would look like
this:

The trouble here is that I'm calling the (relatively expensive) getitem() four
times instead of twice, so instead of space inefficiency I get performance inefficiency.
That's OK, I can assign the values the first time I call for them. So I tried this:

But no, that's a syntax error. Discussed it at length on IRC and discovered that other
people were as dumbfounded by python syntax as I was, but ultimately that python assignments
are not expressions, as this page explains: it allows you to make the mistake if x = 0: instead of if x ==
0:.

Well, isn't that clever? So as a result I have to go and write it like this:

It's been some years since this diary was
included in the ACM Queue RSS feed. As I noted
at the time, the topics in the diary range far beyond the normal subject material for ACM
Queue, so I quickly modified the structure of the diary to present the content as a series
of articles on various topics. ACM Queue takes the ones with a computer topic. Last month
that was 33 articles out of a total of 91.

But somehow that's not restrictive enough. This is a diary, not
a blog, and the main purpose is for me to
make notes for myself. And lots of them, while relating to computers, must be deathly
boring to most readers. So I'm further restricting content displayed on ACM Queue by
explicitly excluding some things, such as my beginning steps in python. They're
still there on my normal diary.

What's a namespace? A filesystem? How do they differ from name spaces and file systems?
Is it just a difference in spelling, or is it a difference in meaning? My spelling check
highlights both words as incorrect.

Taking a step back: one of the biggest differences between English and German spelling is
that in German nouns are written together, like „Filmempfindlichkeitseinstellung“, which
looks terrifying until you split it up into Film Empfindlichkeits Einstellung (“film
sensitivity setting”, which has the same number of syllables). There's a tendency in German
to do this split, although it's a breach of spelling rules. And, it seems, there's the
opposite tendency in English.

But discussing the matter on IRC, Callum Gibson suggested that there was a difference in
meaning between “file system” and “filesystem”. I don't see that difference, though it's
clear that the word itself has two distinct but related meanings: one is the code that
provides the interface, usually in the kernel, and the other is the collection of data
structures on the storage medium. There's probably more of a justification for “namespace”,
which didn't previously have any intrinsic meaning.

So I went looking in the fountain of all knowledge. I drew a blank for “filesystem”, but “namespace” is there, attested since 1975:

1975 B. C. Goldstein & T. W. Scrutchin in Proc. 2nd Ann. Symposium on Computer
Archit. (Assoc. Computing Machinery) 215/1 A local namespace is associated with each
i-stream. Through the name space, the i-stream has access to other namespaces.

It's interesting to note that this quote wasn't sure whether to run the words together or
not.

“File” is more interesting. OED has 7 meanings for it, including concubines, whores and
worthless people (the last a separate meaning). But the one I'm looking for is the second.
It derives from the (now obsolete) meaning “a thread”. There are many computer-related
quotes there, but the word “file system” doesn't show up in any of them—clearly an
oversight.

So: what do I do? There are many other run-together words in English, such as seafarer and
bookcase, but they're older. Modern usage still seems to be to keep the words apart. Until
I have a better idea, I'll stick to the OED usage.

It's been a while since I revisited the
Wikipedia Speck page, which had previously
described a very limited use of the word. In the process of tidying it up, I came across
this statement:

The term "Speck" became part of popular parlance only in the eighteenth century and
replaced the older term "bachen", a cognate of "bacon".

The reference here is to German. OED tells me
that the word “bacon” comes from the French. Yvonne has
never heard of „Bachen“, though she points out that „Bache“ is a wild sow. So today I
finally got round to looking it up in
the Deutsches Wörterbuch.
No hits, but there was one for „Bachenspeck“. The description is completely atypical of the dictionary:

That's only a quotation. It doesn't even say what it means, beyond the Latin
translation lardum pernae, which Google Translate translates as
“bacon ham”. But why is this part of the DWB so superficial? By contrast, the entry for
„Speck“ goes over a couple of pages. That's not related to the words, but the part of the
dictionary. The part with „Bachenspeck“ was written
by Jacob Grimm and completed in 1853,
while „Speck“ was written after his death by people whose names say nothing, and completed
in 1903.

So yes, maybe the word was once in use. But so far there's no substantiation for the claim
in Wikipedia.

The 360° panorama I took of the mess in the dining room a couple of days ago may not have
been of very great interest from the point of view of the subject, but it was a lot of
work. The biggest problem was illumination: the room is relatively dark, but there are many
windows. There's a great depth of field: the closest objects were less than 1 m away, but
part of the view goes 15 m down the hallway:

The distance makes flash impractical. Probably I should have done
some HDR bracketing,
but I'm not even sure that 5 EV would cover it. What I did instead was to take a series of
images with the curtains drawn where I could. But I wasn't sure that the images in the
foreground would be adequately exposed, so I went around again with the on-camera flash.

With these images I had a number of possibilities. Hugin offers a number of different ways of
stitching:

Exposure corrected, low dynamic range: the images are simply blended.

Exposure fused from stacks. In this case Hugin looks for groups of images with
the same viewpoint and first fuses them. This is effectively the same as what I do with
my HDR preprocessing.

Exposure fused from any arrangement. Here Hugin looks for images with similar
exposure and makes partial panoramas out of them. Then it joins them together. The
danger here is ghosting, as I've seen in other examples.

The first time through I processed only the images taken without flash, 30 seconds at f/8.
The simple LDR blending is clearly completely unacceptable. The highlights are badly burnt
out:

There's not really much point in running the “fused from stacks” option, because there are
no stacks. But for the fun of it I tried it anyway, and compared it with the “fused from
any arrangement” image (second):

Not surprisingly, there's little to choose between the two, and they're much better than the
simple LDR version. But the windows are still too bright and marginally burnt out, and in
some areas the fused (“from stacks”) version isn't as good as the blended one:

So finally we have the bookcases in place, and we could fill up the water bed, all 720 odd
litres of it. We decided to put in both the old and the new heating pads, which look
surprisingly similar for different companies and 18 years' difference in age:

I can only assume that that they're really from the same company, and the company changed
its name in that time. Even the control units look identical.

We had the idea of putting some hot water in as well to lessen the power consumption of
heating it up, but that proved to be too hot for the bladder. But to raise 720 litres of
water by 10° takes 30.24 kWh of energy, which at 350 W takes—surprisingly-exactly 24 hours,
so there was nothing we could do today.

It seems that yesterday Simon
Hackett gave a presentation about issues with the Australian National Broadband Network, pointing to serious deficiencies. In recent times most
criticism relating to the NBN has been directed at the Federal Opposition's planned
castration of the network, as I've commented in the past. But no, while Simon disagrees with that too, this time he's talking
about the cost. If his calculations are right, by 2040 the NBN will cost 5 times as much as
ADSL (which, strangely, will cost exactly as much as it does now, a round $20 per month).

He comes up with a number of suggestions about how to reduce the cost. Firstly, and by far
the most controversially: get rid
of POTS
(or PSTN). That's fine in the cities—I'm
planning to get rid of mine almost as soon as the radiation tower is operative—but it'll be a long
time before they can get rid of it nation-wide. Still, he's talking about 2040, 27 years in
the future. 27 years ago things looked very different.

Then he wants to reduce the size of the NBN connection hardware, which (for fibre)
apparently includes 4 different boxes. Certainly the idea of supplying four different
Ethernet connectors for 4 different ISPs appears a little baroque, but what's the chance
that particular format will stay anyway? And I don't see it as being a big cost or size
factor for very long. His real suggestion, though, is to limit NBN's activity to the fibre;
the termination device should be supplied by the RSP (NBN's term for Retail Service Provider, i.e. an ISP), or
presumably by the customer, like it is nowadays with ADSL modems. That certainly makes
sense, especially to the ISP, who is now the only ISP involved.

Network infrastructure is another one. I didn't hear the presentation, but the slides
appear to suggest 7 redundant POIs instead of the currently planned 121 POIs without
failover. Certainly we need failover; the recent destruction of Warrnambool
telephone exchange highlights that. It's interesting that a follow-up article about that event states:

The Victorian government is rolling out a backhaul fibre link to Warrnambool, and has
suggested that this could be connected to the National Broadband Network (NBN). It warned
that increased centralisation built into the NBN, and the decommissioning of the existing
copper network, would make it more vulnerable to outages.

So: when even the government has recognized the issues, do we really need Simon to press the
point? What I see from the article looks partially self-serving (only one ISP per
connection, like with ADSL), but on the other hand it makes the point that the baroque
design of the termination points is an unnecessary cost factor, and that allowing ISP or end
user to supply the termination hardware would open the market to competition and reduce
costs.

Somehow, though, I'm not convinced by this presentation. It's not up to Simon's normal
standard. How could any of the changes he's proposing reduce the cost of the network by
80%?

I should have taken photos of the
garden on 15 July 2013, but I've been so busy lately that I
only got round to it today. Despite the lack of attention and the middle of winter, things
don't look too bad.

How much salt do you put in a dish? Look at just about any dish requiring salt, and it will
be specified simply as “salt”, or if you're lucky “salt to taste”. A complete cop-out.
It's all the worse when, as in many cases, you can't tell whether the salt was right until
the dish is finished.

An example: as the result of a couple of misunderstandings, we have many kilograms of dried
beans, peas and lentils, so I'm planning to eat more of them. Today we had a salade de haricots (white bean salad),
which I've eaten before. But the recipe didn't look convincing: 500 g dried beans, “10 g
(?)” salt? That seemed wrong, so I added much more, ultimately 35 g. And at the end,
Yvonne told me there wasn't enough salt.

Not just that: the sauce tasted boring. Last time it didn't. But just a little salt
brought it to life. It's surprising how much difference it makes.

Looking at the online version of the recipe, it seems that I quickly revised the 10 g (?) to
20 g (?), but didn't note the fact in the printed recipe. Still, that's also far too
little. It looks like 45 g would be about appropriate—and that means, effectively, 9% salt
by weight for beans. I should start keeping a list of how much salt each kind of dish requires.

Finally finished last week's assignments for my linear algebra course. Algebra?
Statistical analysis using vectors. They're not due until next week, but the next
assignments are there already, and I want to keep up to date.

So on with the next week's lectures. No question, we're talking mathematics here. And I
don't understand any of it! At the beginning of the series it seemed that they paid too
much attention to things that were obvious; now it's very much the other way round. What's
a vector space? I have a vague
idea, but only a vague one, and the concept is central to the whole course. Maybe part of
the problem is that I want to understand where the story is going. Another is that the
vector representation is so strange. The lecturer justifies this with the claim that it's
easy to understand vectors if you have a concrete representation, rather than using the
abstract concepts. I think it's probably the other way round: until you understand the
concepts, you can't implement. Looks like I have a lot of reading to do elsewhere. And why
are these lectures so short? Even the longest are less than 20 minutes long.

House photos again today. Since discovering
the alternative stitching methods (blended and fused), I've been using them more and more.
But it's becoming ever clearer that they only work well when the panorama matches up really
well. Today I did the verandah panorama with “fused from any arrangement”, and got a
flash panorama looking like this:

I'm somewhat self-conscious about my slow progress in the linear algebra course, to the point where
I modified my PHP scripts to exclude certain
topics, such as this one, from publication on ACM
Queue. And then I wrote another article on the topic, and it showed up in ACM Queue
anyway. It didn't take long to find the bug—but that should never have happened. Egg on my
face.

I was horrified by the report a few weeks back
that Evo Morales, the president
of Bolivia, had been refused transit
through Europe from Moscow
to La Paz because he was suspected of
transporting Edward Snowden. But
further research suggested that the reporting
was very inaccurate: there was conflicting information, the countries that allegedly denied
passage weren't even on the way, the country in which they landed was not included in the
list of rogue countries, and there was clear evidence of equipment malfunction. As a
result, I'm watching how the matter develops, and whether we will ever hear an official
reaction from Italy, which I suspect was
only included in the list because it was necessary to support the story.

I've subscribed to Google alerts looking
for the text “Morales complaint”. It's amazing how many false positives there are, mainly
related to people called Morales in trouble with the US law. Today I found one that related to Evo Morales and intercepted planes—but not what I expected. It
seems that the Bolivian Air Force searched a Brazilian military plane assigned to the
Brazilian Defence Minister two years ago and searched it for drugs. Another report suggests they were really searching for a stowaway. Now isn't that
interesting? Is the concept of intercepting and searching planes a well-known concept in
Bolivia?

It's been over a month since I last set the time on my new watch. At the time I had estimated that it was gaining
about 6 seconds a month. But since that time it has gained 15 seconds, more like 12 seconds
a month. Set it to 4 seconds slow again.

It's been over 3 years since I last
brewed any beer. And I don't see it happening again any time soon; I've become too lazy for
that. But I had plenty of supplies lying around—3 to 4 year old malt, barely still usable,
and what proved to be several kilograms of hops. Offered them to a good home on Freecycle a while back, and finally found a taker who
knew what to do with them. They came
from Bacchus Marsh today and picked
them up. Now to get rid of the equipment, which should be worth some money.

A lot of discussion about cooking on IRC today. Does it make sense to use a tablet computer
to view your recipes? That was one of the reasons I bought a tablet last year. My experience with this particular device
was so negative that I didn't even try it in the kitchen: it went back. But that was that
specific tablet, and potentially a tablet could be useful in the kitchen; it's just that it
seems to be a lot of money for one small application. If I were to do that, a relatively
modern laptop seems preferable.

Then Gregory Orange came up singing the praises of My CookBook, a tablet App that he uses
extensively in the kitchen. Went looking, and found a description with screen
shots:

That goes against a lot of things I consider holy: measurements in cups, tiny display.
Gregory tells me that this is a phone display, and that a “real” tablet with 1024x768
display would look better. And you can edit the recipes.

On the positive side, though, the idea of displaying the ingredients on the left and the
method on the right makes a lot of sense. This example does it wrong: it refers to apples
in the directions, but they don't show (yet) in the ingredients. Still, it's a good idea,
and something that I might be able to do in my own recipes.

Apart from that, found some interesting features:

Synchronize your recipes on different devices using dropbox

Create shopping lists using your recipe ingredients

Scale the ingredients to serve more or less people

The first point is unclear, but the other two make a lot of sense. And not for the first
time, I was left wondering whether my “I did it my way” approach is not limiting what I can
do. Did some more investigation and found that there's a normal web interface, so
signed up for that.

The results were more sobering. The first thing is to find a recipe. OK, I was already
looking for a recipe for Bibimbap, so
did a search. Eight recipes—not bad, until I realized that they were nearly all from
taste.com.au. It seems that the choice of
language also limits your search to sites with that “language”. It makes
sense to limit the recipes to a specific natural language, but this application
distinguishes between five different forms of “English”. In my case, it was “English
(australia)” [sic], and as a result I only got Australian recipes. With “English
(united states)” I got no less than 318,000 results—far too many. Tried importing a couple,
including a French and a German version. The web interface doesn't make it easy: after
finding the recipes, you have to click on “Import recipes”, and then you
discover that no context gets passed—you have to copy the URL to enter.

After that, things aren't too bad. It strips the normal random junk that so many online
recipes have, and the resultant format isn't bad. But the content is still an unchanged
online recipe. It should be possible to edit the recipe, but all I can see is “my
comments”, which is rather too little for my liking.

One decidedly good thing about the site, though, is the list of sites from which the
application can import recipes. That and the search function have a higher signal to noise
ratio than a random search with Google.

We had some risotto left over from a meal
last week, and some chicken breast as well, so I went looking for an Italian style chicken
dish which would go with it. Found a recipe for Pollo in cacciucco in Lonernza De' Medici's
“Tuscany: The beautiful Cookbook”, but that was for a whole chicken. So in the end I
called what I made simply pollo ai
funghi (chicken with mushrooms).

When we moved in to the house six years ago, it was clear
that we needed more shelf space, and on 1 August 2007 I bought some
shelving for the four wardrobes in various rooms. I didn't get them installed quickly—the
first ones were a year later, and to date that's all I
have done.

For some reason, Yvonne got impatient, so I've finally bit
the bullet and asked Bryan Jackson to put the shelves in the other three wardrobes. Finally
we have space!

I've just finished reading the end of my paper diaries, from January 1968 via the end of contiguous diaries on 1 October 1970 until the final isolated entry on 14 June 1977. It hasn't been as
pleasant a reading as I had expected—you remember the good things, but you tend to write
down the bad things as well, and there's so much of that that I'll probably never type them
in.

But one thing I discovered was that my original assumptions about various anniversaries were
wrong. I've already noted that a number of anniversaries fall in mid to late July—in two
days' time, for example, I will have known Yvonne for 31
years—but now I discover that the end of July seems to have been a good time to meet girls.
44 years ago I met Teen Rozalla, who was important to me at the time, and it seems that I
met my first wife, Doris née Pischke, on 19 July 1973, just over 40 years ago, though at the
time it was so important that I didn't make any mention of it for a month. Previously I had
thought that this had happened a month earlier.

And then there are the three houses we moved in to on 27 July 1982, 17 July 1997 and 10 July 2007, and my first arrival in
Germany on 27 July 1967. They say time stops things all happening at
once, but something seems to have gone wrong here.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She worked for UNIVAC in 1949 who made some of the first
computers ever. In 1951 she discovered the first computer “bug.”. In 1952 she had an
operational compiler. “Nobody believed that,” she said. “I had a running compiler and nobody
would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.” A compiler is the reason
you have an Operating System with programs, a phone with apps. There would be no Windows or
Apple or facebook or twitter or tumblr without her.

OK, I don't know much about Grace Hopper, but I did know that she found her bug in the
1940s, and that UNIVAC was introduced in 1951. And compilers in 1952? Where does this
nonsense come from?

Further investigation was instructive. Yes, Hopper did join the Eckert and Mauchly Company
Computer, which later became UNIVAC, in 1949. And yes, she created a “compiler” for
the A-0 System in 1952. It seems that
calling it a compiler required a stretch of the
imagination: autocoder might have been
a better term—indeed, it seems that she used this term herself. But it also seems that she
coined the term “compiler”, so it can't be wrong. The only thing that's completely wrong
was the date of the bug, which was found in 1947.

But: “A compiler is the reason you have an Operating System with programs”.
Like OS/360 or even the earliest versions
of Unix, no doubt. But It Must Be True. I
read it on the Internet.

And that's the problem. There's a germ of veracity in the article, but it's so lopsided
that I initially thought it was all wrong. God protect us from this level of “information”.

Two years ago I bought a new vacuum cleaner for
Yvonne. I was very happy with the choice, but not so Yvonne,
who kept complaining that it didn't work well. After the new carpets were laid, I used it
myself. She was right. So we already need a new vacuum cleaner. This time Yvonne took me
to a specialist, Vacuums Ballarat in Norwich Plaza, along with Zhivago to illustrate one of the issues. Small company,
husband (Bill) and wife (Viv), but Bill knows his stuff and ended up selling us a
semi-professional device with easy cleaning, for 4 times the price I paid two years ago.

Back home, tried the thing out. Yes, much better. But the junk it pulls out of the carpets
still clogs things, and the instructions are some of the worst I have seen. It has a big
paper filter, about 35 cm in diameter, and it needs removing. How? They don't say. If
Bill hadn't demonstrated one to me, I wouldn't have been able to work it out. As it was, it
seems that the filter was wedged in the upper part of the device and needed a tug with a
pair of pliers to remove it. But that should be explained in the instructions.

On the way into town, stopped at
the Napoleons General Store. Small
shops in remote areas have problems, and many have shut down, but they seem to be doing
something right in Napoleons. So it was a little disappointing to see that they have
removed the petrol pumps:

The petrol there was relatively expensive, of course, but occasionally I've found it made
sense to top up the tank there rather than go the further 12 km
into Sebastopol. It looked
ominous that they are removing it. Such proved not to be the case, though: they're just
modernizing it.

We took Zhivago to town primarily because he
didn't want to stay at home alone, though it was good to demonstrate him for the vacuum
cleaner. On the way home, I went for my quarterly haircut and took Zhivago with me. The
barber's eyes lit up:

One of the things that I found while investigating My CookBooka couple of days ago was the Cuisine et vins de France web site. CVF is
also a magazine, or it was 20 years ago, when we subscribed to it for a couple of years. We
still have the magazines—they were frustrating because many recipes required ingredients we
couldn't get even in Germany—and today I pulled them out and took a look. One of the
recipes, tajine de bœuf aux
pois chiches, caught our eye, and we decided to cook it this weekend.

So I went looking on My CookBook, and sure enough, I found the
recipe pretty much verbatim, strangely not on CVF's site but http://www.cuisineaz.com/. So I fought the “import” interface and “imported”
it, to a somewhat unnecessarily password protected page. What
did it really do? It removed the advertisements, but also some of the comments
(“Difficulty”, for example), and it reformatted it, somewhat worse than the original. Do I
need that? Maybe it's useful for the app, but I don't see much added value in this
particular case. I'm still much happier with my version, though all I really did was to
rearrange the ingredients to match the sequence of preparation.

No, what had happened was that it appears that I had forgotten to umount
the other backup disk before removing it. So the mount remained, but that device was
no longer there (ENODEV). On earlier versions of FreeBSD I would have had a panic. Now I only had a
confusing error message.

Clearly there's scope for improvement here. The most obvious one is a less confusing error
message, but how about a forced umount of the old device under these circumstances?
And it would be interesting to consider an automatic soft umount after a certain
period of inactivity: the disk remains mounted, but the data structures on disk are
synchronized in the same way as umount would do, so that if it gets removed, it's
completely consistent and doesn't need an fsck.

Spam is bad at the moment, and I'm continually wondering whether I shouldn't do something
draconian like whitelists. But the spammers are not getting any cleverer. Or maybe they're
catering to the toy MUA crowd who can't see the nonsense they're sending:

One of the results of tidying up the house was that I found a whole lot of old photos that I
need to scan in. And after my experience with SANE, I've decided to use my Microsoft box to do scanning. That works about as well
as you can expect with a Microsoft box, but one irritating thing is that it saves the
scanned data on the Microsoft machine, and I have to move it manually to eureka.
What I need is a symlink.

But doesn't Microsoft have symlink functionality? Does it work to external file systems?
Asked on IRC and was told that it was called a “shortcut” (another modern joining of two
words), and that I could make one by pushing mice between “Windows Explorer” windows.

I feel uneasy with this sort of thing: I want to be able to write down how to do it, and the
obvious way is to use an appropriate command. But the combined wisdom of the
Microsoft-heads on IRC only managed to find an almost appropriate web page. But it did describe how to do it: a command
called MKLINK:

On with my linear algebra course today. I'm gradually catching up with the schedule, but
I'm still having great difficulty understanding the material. Much of it seems to be a
matter of inadequate explanation. For example, in the same lecture I get these two
statements:

Span {[1,2],[3,4]}: All points in the plane. Two-dimensional

Span {[1,3],[2,6]} is 1-dimensional.

Huh? Is this stuff correct? How can that be? No explanation. It took me a while to
realize that the issue here is that [2,6] is in the span of [1,3], whereas [3,4] is not in
the span of [1,2]. But why not explain it?

I now understand that one, but in the next week's lectures the descriptions of multiplying
matrices with vectors are so hazy that I'm still not sure that I've understood them. For
some reason, the Wikipedia page also confuses me, maybe because it uses notations that are unfamiliar
to me. And yet all this stuff is so simple! I've found I already have the sources for the
operations, written in FORTRAN
IV and presumably over 40 years old:

Admire the comments. Admittedly, this comes from a package
(UNIVAC, I think) that came with a
detailed manual explaining the parameters. It's also interesting to see how FORTRAN's lack
of array metadata significantly complicates the calling sequence.

He thought this was a general restriction, but of course I have been stitching many more
than that, coincidentally with an almost identical configuration. He sent me his images and
I was able to stitch them with no problems. What was the difference? I sent him some more
suggestions about what to do, but he wanted to go off in another direction: since the error
was reported by vigra,
he wanted to try various versions of the dependent ports.

In my experience, that's the wrong approach. But it was Thomas' choice, so I left him to
it. Today I got a message back: yes, it was vigra. Not just that—it depended on
what compiler it was compiled with! Currently if you include numpy, it gets compiled
with gcc 4.6; otherwise it gets compiled with gcc
4.2.

That can't be true! So I tried it. It is true. What a horrible situation! Thomas
suggests that some structures get allocated differently by the two compilers. That's
possible, but one way or another it's a real concern.

Nele Kömle is doing some horsey stuff at Chris Bahlo's at the moment, and we thought it
prudent for her to stay with us. It seems she's taking classical singing lessons—one of the
things she's working on at the moment is „Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben“
from Mozart's Zaide.
She knows this recording with Lucia
Popp:

It reminded me of the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” in Gluck's
“Orfeo ed Euridice”, so I
pointed her at the Naxos CD library at the State Library of
Victoria, so we tried things out. It didn't work well. My notwork connection showed
itself from its worst side, so I dug out a CD of Orfeo and tried to play it. How do you
play a CD with mplayer? I've
forgotten; talking to cd://1 didn't work. But I have a CD player there, so I tried
that. And since the last time I used it, it has developed mechanical problems and wouldn't
open. Another repair job to look at some other time.

So back to SLV. This time the network connection was better, but SLV were having trouble
with their system. After about 30 minutes we finally got it to play and discovered that the
recording we found wasn't nearly as good as the one with Popp. Somehow the Naxos library
needs significantly better search functions.

And only later did it occur to me that „Ruhe sanft“ bears quite a strong resemblance to
„Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen“
from Bach's
„Ich habe genug“. Since they both
talk about sleeping, I wonder if they might have been derived from an old lullaby.

No specifications for quantities of salt, of course. In total we used 35 g.

The spices seemed inappropriate for North African food, in particular quatre épices, and we ended up changing
them. Left out the quatre épices and
added cumminseed
and cinnamon. Not enough, as it
turned out; I've adjusted the recipe for “next time”.

Why do so many recipes cook food until it disintegrates? This recipe wanted the chick
peas cooked for an hour before even starting the main preparation (requiring cooking for
another 90 minutes). After the first hour they were cooked through.

A Tajine in an oven? The whole
purpose of the thing is to keep the pyramid at the top cool. We cooked it on the stove.

And the result? Quite good, not spectacular. But the quantities! It was only 500 g of
meat, but between the three of us (with Chris Bahlo) we didn't eat more than a third of it,
and in the end we were completely bloated. We had served it
with Cous-cous, which is really not
necessary: the chick peas do the job.

Yvonne came in round dusk to say that Darah was lying on the ground and wouldn't stay up. There's
nothing wrong with horses lying down from time to time, but this was too long. Went out to
take a look. Her neck muscles were very tense, something that she's had before and which
could lead to Laminitis. But she
seemed to be in no pain, and I was able to get her to stand up for a while, but then she lay
down again, rolled over and kicked, and then turned back on her
stomach. Colic? She had just eaten,
which horses with colic normally don't to. But it would have to happen on a Saturday
evening.

Yvonne called Chris Bahlo, who was due for dinner anyway in
an hour, and she came and took a look. This time Darah had her forelegs stretched out,
which Chris thought might be to press her stomach on the ground to cool it. But she wasn't
sweating, which is usually an issue with colic. We checked her for muscle pain and found
nothing there either, but her gums were very pale, suggesting some kind of circulatory
issue.

In the end we decided to leave it until after dinner. Yvonne didn't want to come out to
look, but she needn't have worried. Darah was standing up and looking relatively normal; a
couple of hours later she still was, so whatever it was, it doesn't seem to have been as
serious as we feared.

One of the ingredients in the original tajine de bœuf aux pois chiches recipe was “quatre épices (“four spices”). But which? Went looking in our cookbooks, and
found information only
in Stephanie Alexander's
The
Cook's Companion. There she wanted cloves, pepper, nutmeg and powdered dried ginger.
That doesn't sound very French. So I went looking on Wikipedia and discovered that the
number four is a coincidence: it's really Pimenta dioica, known in English
as Allspice, along with a surprising
number of names in various languages. Interestingly, the page describes the flavour as
being exactly what Stephanie Alexander suggests. And it is used in Morocco, and
Mohamed Ifadir confirms that it's quite popular.

We served Cous-cous with the dinner.
I've always had problems getting the kernels fluffy and not sticking together, even with
pre-cooked cous-cous (which is about all we can buy round here). Tried mixing it in
my Kenwood Chef mixer, but that's
far too difficult for it. It relies on things sticking together, and if they don't,
it just pushes them to the edge:

Received mail from Donald Rumph enclosing a number of photos of the remains of a bassoon that he
bought recently. It's in very poor condition, probably not worth restoring, but it's
interesting because of its construction:

The bell and keywork appear to be missing, which doesn't make it any easier to identify,but
looking at the construction I'd guess it to be round 1810. The back of
the butt shows a number of surprising things:

There's some kind of floral decoration round the top and bottom, an oval piece of wood
missing above the F hole, F♯ key missing, and what looks like a metal flap between the F
hole and where the F♯ hole would have been.

Who made it? The wood reminds me of Savary jeune, but that's about all that does.
On the bass joint there's a saddle and hole to the left of the D key, obviously for E♭.

And the metal flap? No idea. The strange thing is that the instrument really doesn't seem
to have an F♯ key. The flap is far too high to cover the hole. But I've never seen a
bassoon of that era without an F♯ key before.

By chance Caroline Hamilton came by this afternoon, mainly to look at Wotan (who is part
Iceland pony and should thus really be
called Óðinn), who has some back problems.
While she was here she took a look at Darah and came
to the conclusion that yes, she had probably had a
mild colic. She found her stomach to
be sore to the touch—exactly what I had tried the previous evening without noticing
anything—and gave her some treatment to loosen her stomach. It looks like it was a
relatively mild attack.

I have my doubts about this linear
algebra course that I'm doing, but I'm really determined to finish it anyway. They've
brought out a book to match the course. Is it any better? It has a total of 528 pages of
American “letter” paper, which certainly makes it a lot more detailed than the lectures, and
it includes material not in the course. I'm not convinced, but it seems a good investment,
though the price relationships are irritating: $30 for the book and $26 for postage so that
it will get here before the course is over.

On with the lectures, and it's beginning to make more sense. Solving matrix equations using
standard generators. One of the nice things about watching lectures on video is that you
can pause them and try to first-guess what the lecturer is saying. For a while it worked.
First example: stretch an image 2× horizontally. Conversion matrix is [[2, 0],
[0,1]]. Makes perfect sense.

Next rotate counterclockwise by θ°. [1, 0] becomes [cos θ, sin θ],
and [0, 1] becomes [- sin θ, cos θ], so the matrix is [[cos θ, - sin
θ], [sin θ, cos θ]]. Simple once you get used to it, and I was able to write it down
here without referring to the notes.

Next one seems simple enough: translate the vectors by [1, 2]. That's additive.
How do you represent it with multiplication? I sat there for a while and couldn't work out
how to do it. Then I looked at the example. He came up with a conversion matrix [[2,
1], [2, 3]]. And yes, put [1, 0] or [0, 1] into that matrix and you
come out with the correct translation. But that's the only way you get good
results. [1, 1] should give [2. 3], but in fact it gives [3, 5].

What didn't I understand? Went looking elsewhere and found that it shouldn't work at all,
because all this stuff assumes that the origin doesn't change.

But despite shortcomings in the presentation, there seems to be no reason to doubt the
lecturer's understanding of his subject, especially in such a basic area. Spent over an
hour trying to understand, and finally gave up and moved on to the next lecture. Surprise,
surprise! “What I said in the previous lecture wasn't strictly true”. In fact, it
was Just Plain Wrong. Yes, working through incorrect assumptions is not necessarily bad,
but it needs faster resolution, certainly in the same lecture, and preferably immediately
after presenting the calculation (he moved on to other topics afterwards in that lecture).
No wonder I'm having such difficulty.

Based on yesterday's experience (a French word that also means “experiment”) with the
tajine de bœuf aux pois
chiches, typed in my changes. It took me 90 minutes and generated 162 lines of
diffs. I wonder how long that would take with a tablet and without a keyboard.

On Saturday evening Chris Bahlo were looking at the web site of her new employer, ruadvertising.com.au. First question: does it
render correctly? Well, sort of, modulo overrun at the bottom, caused by guessing that I
would use the standard character size. We were looking at the page on the TV, 58"
diagonal, but some distance away. I've already noted that resolution isn't the
issue: it's angle of view. At default sizes, it's illegible on the TV.

Chris took that on board and then asked “And what is it like under Internet Explorer?”. I knew the answer, but of course the real
challenge was getting “Internet Explorer” to display on the TV. For that I had to go into
the office and wake dxo, my Microsoft box. And of course “Internet Explorer”
displayed correctly, but illegibly small.

The real issue, though: why should I have gone into the office? Doesn't this thing
have Wake on LAN? It handles suspend
very well. Today I did some investigation and ran into lots of dead ends. You'd expect to
find the information on the Microsoft web site somewhere, but all I
could find was related to “Windows” 7 (I'm using “Vista”). Even when I searched
specifically for “Vista” documentation, the first link was to the ”Windows” 7 documentation,
and the second, though it looked promising, had no information on the topic. Thank you,
Microsoft.

So I went out looking for details on the web, and came up with the usual selection, most
relating to problems with the facility. This page looked
almost OK until I got to point 7:

Enable the following options by highlighting them and selecting "Enable" in the drop-down
menu: "Wake on LAN," "Wake on Magic Packet," "Wake on Pattern Match," "Wake From Shutdown"
and "Wake on LAN From Power Off."

Problem: none of these settings were there. Wrong NIC? Possible. But there's a setting
under “Power Management”: “Allow this device to wake the computer”. So I set that.

Next point: how do I send a wakeup packet? That proved to be much easier than I thought.
FreeBSD has a program wake(1) that does
just that. There are different ways, but it seemed the cleanest was to add the name of the
machine in /etc/ethers:

00:21:86:12:ba:7e dxo

The man page claims that the name has to be fully qualified, but it lies. And how about
that, it worked! Total work about 10 minutes.

And then I heard a noise. Following up, discovered that dxo was running again. I
hadn't done anything. Put it back to sleep and pinged it. It woke up.

A Magic Packet can also wake a remote computer. A Magic Packet is a standard wake-up
frame that targets a specific network interface.

That's actually not a bad piece of documentation, and I can even understand that those
packets could reasonably be expected to wake the machine. And ita carries on to say that you
can get “normal” Wake on LAN behaviour by setting the “Only allow management stations to
wake the computer” box in the power management tab:

Why did I make such a mess of it? It was taken with my old Nikon
“Coolpix” 880, but it had a usable viewfinder. But looking back at my
instrument photos, few of them look much good. Were my standards that much lower in those
days?

In any case, I still have the oboe, so it's relatively simple to take another photo.
Years ago I bought a “light tent” for taking this kind of
photo:

Aligi Voltan had already sent me some better images, but why not take some more photos while
the tent was set up? The tent is too small for a bassoon, so I took the Sautermeister apart
and took photos of the joints. They didn't look bad, but they had obvious flare:

Where did that come from? The tent, obviously. Part of the function is to spread light in
all directions, including into the lens. How about a lens hood? On the whole I'm not
overly convinced by lens hoods, especially on zoom lenses where they can only work properly
at the shortest focal length. But it's worth a try:

Still flare. And it's surprising how much difference there was between these two photos,
taken from an identical position under identical circumstances. The only difference was the
lens: the first image was taken with the Zuiko Digital ED
12-60mm F2.8-4.0 SWD, and the second with the Zuiko Digital ED 50mm F2.0
Macro. I had expected the image quality of the second photo to be better.

After a bit of thinking, decided to take photos without the tent, just with reflectors on
the flash units, to compare them. I suppose the photo is marginally better:

How much use is that? I suppose it's about as good as the original recipe. But in the
meantime I've changed it, and I wonder how long it would take Gregory to update it
accordingly. At least it seems to be possible, unlike the web version.

So yesterday I configured Wake on LAN
on dxo, my Microsoft box. Modulo some unexpected behaviour (wake on any LAN
event), it went remarkably smoothly. Today I had more photos to process, so I tried to wake
up dxo again. Nothing.

I'm still making heavy weather of the linear algebra course from Coursera that I started at the beginning
of the month, and I'm devoting more time to it than I expected. So the last thing I
need is another course, right? But I have signed up for no less than three others, in the
hope that they'll be much easier.

Like many people, I've been watching the increasing influence of Google with a mixture of admiration and concern. How can
a company of that size remain true to its motto? And so I get more concerned every time I
see something pointing away from this premise.

Today I read an article in Wired about unnecessary
restrictions on use of Google Fiber. It
seems that the terms of service prohibit “servers”, whatever they may be. The article goes on to assume evil intent
behind these limitations.

That's possible, but the article doesn't make it plausible enough. They
forget Hanlon's razor. What's a
server? We know, of course, and even the article finally gets beyond the initial statement
(with dead link):

The problem is that a server, by definition,
doesn’t have to be a dedicated expensive computer. Any PC or Mac can be a server, as can
all sorts of computing devices.

Of course, a server doesn't have to be hardware at all. But even the correct link doesn't make
that very clear. Can you be sure that the legal people who put together the terms and
conditions understand that?

Your Google Fiber account is for your use and the reasonable use of your guests. Unless
you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host
any type of server using your Google Fiber connection, use your Google Fiber account to
provide a large number of people with Internet access, or use your Google Fiber account to
provide commercial services to third parties (including, but not limited to, selling
Internet access to third parties).

But that's not what I read now, and it's instructive to include the heading in the quote:

Resale and Redistribution

The Fiber Services are intended for the personal use of you and others with whom you share
your residence (including, within reason, guests who are visiting you). You agree not to
resell or repackage the Services for use by people other than those with whom you share
your residence. If you wish to use the Google Fiber Services to provide Internet service
to others, you must enter a separate agreement with Google Fiber that specifically
authorizes you to do so.

So it seems that Google has changed the wording since the article was written. It doesn't
just remove the reference to “servers”: it also tidies up the text in other areas. That
makes sense, and it supports my argument about Hanlon's razor. The concept of “server”,
especially in the Microsoft space, is badly understood. If this incident has helped Google
improve the intelligibility of their legalese, all the better.

And the reason? Under the circumstances, that's moot, but given the context, it seems clear
that this clause distinguishes end-user use from commercial resale. I don't see that
limitation as being “evil”. And even the old wording didn't explicitly prohibit
“... running their own mail server, using a remotely accessible media server, SSHing into a
home computer from work to retrieve files, ...”. That prohibition relies on an agreement on
the meaning of the word “server”. I certainly wouldn't like to rely on the interpretation,
but the changes to the policy seem to bear it out.

Of course, there are lots of people who see the motto as “Don't be evil”, as
borne out by my initial search. But that's at least partially human nature.

We've been making our own Thüringer Rostbratwurst for several months now, and we're quite happy with the taste. The appearance is another
matter: every time so far the skins of at least some of the sausages split.

I've gone through the potential reasons before, and tried several solutions, but the
results are always the same. Today I first half-cooked them in the microwave oven until
they were firm, about 5 minutes on 330 W for 500 g of sausage, and then grilled them. And,
as always, they split on the underside. Why? Is it the way the skins shrink when grilled?
Is it a problem with the casings? We're running out of these collagen casings, so next time
I'll try natural gut casings.